Review: Sacked in Seattle: Game On in Seattle Rookies by Jami Davenport

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Standalone - Men of Tyee #1
Release - August 24, 2017
Genre - NA Contemporary Sports Romance
Dual POV - 1st person
Heat - 3.5 out of 5
Length - 168 pages

He's loved Tiff since high school--but tragedy has blockaded her heart.

Tyee University football player Riley Black has adored Tiff since high school, but she's never felt the same way. As Riley enters his senior year of college, he's finally moving on and enjoying the perks of being a star athlete. Until one glimpse of Tiff unearths all those old feelings of longing and desire, not to mention the trauma of their shared past.

Tiffani Vernon has been running from her demons for seven years. When she's forced to return to Seattle for financial reasons and attend the same college as Riley, she's confronted with the traumatic event which has shaped her future and scarred her memories of Riley. Tiff struggles to avoid her secret high school crush, but he's not having any of it. He's pursuing her with a relentless determination to prove once and for all, they were meant to be together.

Can love finally heal their wounds or will they succumb to the pain and forever wonder what could have been?

Find your copy of Sacked in Seattle here:
Goodreads | Amazon

MY REVIEW

I’ve never read anything from Jami Davenport before and so it was easy to go into this with absolutely no expectations. I didn’t check out any of the advance reviews and went in thinking this would be a light, fluffy, sexy and easy romance read. Boy, was I ever wrong. Not that this wasn’t sexy and romantic, but it definitely wasn’t light or fluffy and the characters most definitely didn’t have things easy.

After a traumatic experience that they both shared, Riley and Tiff bonded and secretly fell in love. And when I say secretly, I mean she knew that he loved her, but he didn’t know that she also loved him. Get it? The night of high school grad, they finally came together physically and it was an existential experience, at least from Riley’s POV. That is until the next morning when Tiff is nowhere to be found. See, she hightailed it to California, never to be heard or seen from again. Until three years later when she shows up enrolled at the same college as Riley. Now that she’s back, he has no intention of letting her go. But can he get past her concrete walls and show her that they can be each other’s forever?

I didn’t like Tiff. There, I said it. My opinion of her did improve by the end, but not in any dramatic way. I went from “I hate this chick SO MUCH” to “Well, she ain’t half bad”. I guess my affection for her all depended on how she treated Riley because RILEY WAS PHENOMENAL!! I get why Tiff had her walls and fears and hangups, but if anyone had a reason or right or privilege to have those, it would be Riley. This young man had it hard and I was so happy that his life was just steadily improving day by day. This author created a sweetheart of a character when it came to Riley and he was beyond easy to fall in love with. So when, at every instance, he was throwing himself and opening his heart to this ungrateful wretch, who kept turning him aside and hurting him at every turn, my heart went out to him and my fists clenched to hit her.

So now that I’ve read this story, you better believe I’ll be staying tuned for what’s next in this series. I have to know how Gabe fares and I hope there’s a book for him in the future. And I hope to see Riley again too.